The world held its breath.
The moons were gone. One by one, they had vanished into the silence. The stars collapsed into the black, leaving only the eclipse — vast, throbbing, like the slow pulse of a dying god.
You stood beneath it.
Alone. Broken. Ready.
Your friend — the vessel, the boy you once knew, the one who carried the serpent's curse — lay on his knees in the storm. The dragon's soul was gone now. Torn from him when the eclipse opened, as was the price.
But the power… the power remained.
He could still feel you. Even now. The thoughts that shimmered in your dying breath. The love that even the gods could not drown.
Your name slipped from his lips. It trembled like the rain between sky and earth.
You walked forward, body unraveling in light. The fox spirit within you stirred — not in rage, not in vengeance, but recognition. The eclipse called for sacrifice, and you had answered.
But the dragon stirred.
Something within your friend cracked — not his bones, but his memories. The possession had ended, but a voice still echoed in him. Not the dragon. Not the god.
You.
And love.
He rose — not to stop you, but to touch the fox within you.
A sound — deeper than thunder, older than time — cracked the earth.
The sea boiled. The air bent.
Above, something beneath the world shuddered — ancient gears grinding against forgotten laws. And then the seven moons began to vanish again, not one by one… but all at once.
Time shattered.
The wind stopped.
And in the pause, you looked up.
A figure drifted within the heart of the eclipse. A silhouette — glowing. Familiar. Distant.
You reached toward it as something slipped into your friend's hand.
A scroll. Sealed in blood and ash. He opened it with trembling fingers.
> [Rinokari Tw ymnx dtzw kwnjsi ktc xunwny bfx ozxy mnijsl.]
Selkareth.
The shadows never left — echoes of fire lingered in silence.
He stared. The first line meant nothing. But the second…
> Selkareth.
His breath caught.
It was your secret name for him. The one from your childhood, whispered beneath the shrine's roots. The one you gave when no one else could hear. A name he never told anyone. Not even you knew he remembered.
Somewhere, beneath eclipse and myth and memory…
You still were.
A voice rose — neither his nor yours. Something older. Something watching.
And it whispered:
"One must fall for the other to awaken."
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